Cleantech Talent Shortage Meet CleanLoop

Many have bemoaned the lack of experienced talent in the cleantech sector as of late: the Los Angeles Times in an article this week, former GreenFuel interim CEO Bob Metcalfe when trying to find his replacement, and the New England Clean Energy Council when launching a green fellowship program. And while another green job board won’t help create more talent, a good one could help companies find those talented few and far between.

This morning a startup called VentureLoop, which posts jobs for venture-backed companies, launched a site called CleanLoop to post jobs for the cleantech industry. To bring in new users CleanLoop is offering free job posting between now and August, but after that period job posters will have to pay. A brief look through the job postings site brings up a few positions at startups like solar thin film company Miasole, battery makers A123Systems, synthetic biofuel startup Amyris, and ethanol producer Mascoma.

Here’s our take: It’s relatively easy to launch a job board, but much harder to bring in a lot of users. Hey, even GigaOM has a job board, as does VentureBeat, and TechCrunch. In cleantech Greenbiz.com, and SustainableBusiness.com already have job sites. And we don’t see anything particularly novel about CleanLoop’s approach. But hey, if the cleantech community flocks to the site, then the more power to them. We’ll keep an eye on it and in the meantime check it out and tell us what you think.